10 Reasons Why Facebook wont Enter the Search Market

Facebook is very close to hitting 500 million users worldwide – 500 million users who spent a lot of time on the site.

Many people are questing if Facebook could become a viable search engine with the mass following they currently have.

Getting people to come to Facebook and making it their default place for users to search is another matter. In fact Bing is already integrated into Facebook’s search results

Here are 10 reasons why it won’t happen:

1. Google already holds a strong position and it would take an enormous effort to Facebook to create, implement, test and rollout a similar platform

2. Facebook may think with Microsoft’s huge effort into Bing it is a risky and hefty investment to try themselves.

3. People are not ready for Social Search. Social Search is where data is presented from a persons network/friends on products/data to make informed commercial decisions – the market is not ready for this yet.

4. The perception with Facebook search is finding friends, groups, games, applications – not a typical web search.

5. Many people question Facebook’s current search experience is not accurate like a regular search engine.

6. There is no real compelling reason to conduct regular searches. User interface is complicated and cluttered. Regular search engines also suffer from this.

7. Facebook hasn’t indexed enough user query data to provide as meaningful results than a regular search engine.

8. Facebook has poached a lot of Google engineers, but Google itself has 700 dedicated search engineers. Facebook probably lacks the talent to develop in this market.

9. At the moment you can’t really do Facebook SEO, you can’t optimise your page for higher indexing in the search results. Well there may be ways to do it but very little information on the subject.

10. At the moment Facebook is not actively looking to challenge Google in search. Microsoft has a small % of ownership of Facebook and has implemented Bing into Facebook search results.